Monday, May 21

Camperdown

We recently travelled to the historically significant rural
town of Camperdown (population about 2800) located about a 2 hour drive south
west from Melbourne.

Camberdown is also regarded as the gateway to the Victorian Western Area conveniently located close to the Ballarat gold fields, the National
Parks in the Otway’s and Grampians and the Twelve Apostles along the Great
Ocean Road.

The region was first settled in 1839 by English immigrants Peter
John and Thomas Manifold who eventually chose a 100,000 acre sheep run on the northern
shore of Lake Purumbeke. Others followed and soon a bustling town was
established. There are many historic buildings to visit in the town including
the Court House which was erected in 1886-87 and the Historic Museum built in
1896. An impressive Clock Tower ( see picture above ) extends 30 metres above the streetscape and was
erected in 1896-97 in memory of Thomas Manifold who was killed in a hunting
accident at the age of 30..

The local Historical Society has images of Camperdown when it was once a hub for the vast pastoral empires that
dominated the region. Agriculture blossomed because of the rich volcanic soils and pockets of unusually high rainfall. you can see images by clicking here and to enlarge simply hover over the photographs.

By the early 1950's Camperdown had become a diversified centre for support industries to the wool dairying and agricultural sectors. But since those halcyon days the town has steadily declined due to both drought which curtailed the diary industry.and the closure of the
butter factory. Nevertheless the town still provides support to rich pockets of the Dairy,
Sheep and Beef farming communities.

There is plenty to see in the picturesque lakes
area – Lake Corangamite is the largest lake in Victoria and was part of a vast system of 30 lakes formed from
depressions of erupting volcanoes. On either side of the road in places you see
the effects of this uncommon land forms ( See pictures) as broad circular giant volcanic
creators with steep rock sides glisten with blue water nestled down from the declining green pastureland.

Hence the countryside is interesting and varied since it gravitates from a green lush land- form on one side of the road to one that is barren and foreboding on the
other - a reflection of either bountiful volcanic rich seams of soil to basalt dominated rocky field outcrops. Consequently prices per acre for farming land can vary enormously from as
little as $2,500 to $10,000.

In some areas the immigrants took advantage of the readymade
supply of basalt
rocks to engage in stone fencing which is abundantly evident today in dry
stone walls and homesteads. Initially the walls served three purposes; as boundaries; to keep out Rabbits; and to clear
the land of rocks.

The Djargurd Wurring peoples were the traditional owners of
the land at the time of white settlement and consisted of about 12 clans.

Archeologists have unearthed many sites of fish traps, piles
of surface scatters (artifacts
or cultural material or shells) and burial sites.However
Camperdown was subject to the same sordid history as other regions where pastoralists stole the land from the indigenous inhabitants and subsequently denied access. .

The Djargurd in the 1830’s and 1840’s were
subjected to several massacres in retaliation for sheep killed by aborigines
for food. One clan, the Tarnbeere gundidj,
was massacred by a Frederick Taylor and others at a location known as Murdering
Gully. Click here for the history

Here is a summary: This
massacre site is of significant for the following reasons: the extent to which
the local Aboriginal clan was decimated; the fact that oral histories of this
event have survived, as has detail in local diaries; the perpetrators incurred
considerable censure from Aboriginal protectorate officials, Wesleyan
missionaries, and local people, who demonstrated their disapproval by changing
the name of Taylors River to Mount Emu Creek; and finally, because of the
notoriety of Frederick Taylor, one of the principal actors in the conflict.

A
Djargurd wurrung clan that particularly suffered during the late 1830s was the
Tarnbeere gundidj. This clan's name literally means belonging to Tarnbeere, or
flowing water, a reference to nearby Mount Emu Creek. This clan was effectively
exterminated in a massacre in early 1839 by a group of Europeans led by
Frederick Taylor, the manager at George McKillop and James Smith's station at
Glenorminston, adjoining Lake Terang. Glenorminston was also known as
Weeraweeroit, after the Aboriginal name for the camping place and waterhole on
the rivulet near the home station. Before his involvement in this massacre,
Taylor had earned some notoriety through his involvement in the murder of a
Watha wurrung Aborigine in October 1836. At that time, John Whitehead, a
convict shepherd working for Taylor murdered Woolmudgin, the clan head of the
Watha wurrung balug clan based in the Barrabool Hills near Geelong, apparently with
Taylor's encouragement.

The
Murdering Gully massacre took place in early 1839 and was investigated by
Assistant Protector CW Sievwright, responsible for the Western District of the
Port Phillip Protectorate. The massacre occurred at Puuroyuup, or Puuriyuup, a
gully on the Mount Emu Creek (known to the Djargurd wurrung as Borang yalug),
where the creek is joined by a small unnamed stream from Merida station. At
this gully were camped between 45 to 52 men, women, and children. These people
were predominantly Tarnbeere gundidj , along with members of other Djargurd
wurrung clans and several Gulidjan people. Apparently the massacre was
organised in retaliation for the killing of some of Taylor' sheep by two
Aborigines.

Fortunately
we can learn the details of the massacre from the five accounts that record the
evidence of some of the survivors. From these accounts of this massacre it is
possible to compile a list of Aboriginal informants and survivors.

These
accounts are first hand, and although they agree on the details of the
massacre, some differ on what happened to the corpses. A combination of them
can be summarised as follows.

Having
heard of the encampment at Puuroyuup, Taylor and associates James Hamilton and
Broomfield headed a party of shepherds with the intention of attacking them.
Taylor no doubt agreed with the conventional view held by most settlers that
bullets were the only antidote to Aboriginal sheep stealing, and that, when a
few were shot, the rest kept clear. Furthermore, many settlers believed that it
didn't matter if those attacked were not the actual perpetrators as vicarious
punishment was thought to be just as effective.

As
they approached the gully on horseback, the party formed an extended line with
Taylor in the centre. They found the Aboriginal people asleep and advanced shouting and immediately fired upon them,
killing the whole group except 12 people. They afterwards threw the bodies in a
neighbouring waterhole. One of the survivors was Woreguimoni, a Gulidjan, who
had hidden in the long grass. Karn, alias Mr Anderson, had also safely fled the
gully when the Europeans approached. He returned after they had left the scene,
and began to remove the bodies from the waterhole, placing them on the ground
four deep, head by head. In the course of this, he was discovered by some of
the Europeans, who took him and his wife and child, who had also escaped, to
Taylor's home station, where he and his family were given provisions so that
they would stay nearby, and away from the waterhole. With Karn removed from the
waterhole, a cart was taken to the scene of the massacre and the bodies bought
up to the home station, where they were conveyed to some other waterholes and
thrown in.

Larkikok
had been spared when he stood up and begged Taylor to spare his life. After the
massacre, he sought the refuge of the Buntingdale Wesleyan mission near
present-day Birregurra. Two further survivors of the massacre, Bareetch
Chuurneen - alias Queen Fanny, the 'chieftess' of the clan - and a child, were
pursued to Wuurna Weewheetch (the home of the swallow), a point of land on the
west side of Lake Bullen Merri. With the child on her back, she swam across to
a point called Karm karm, below present day Wurrong homestead, and escaped.
Other survivors included Benadug, Born, Tainneague, and Mammalt.

The
second account of the aftermath of the masssacre comes from Wangegamon, a
Djargurd wurrung man, who escaped by running to the other side of the river and
hiding in the grass behind a tree. From this vantage point he saw his wife and
child killed. After the bodies had been thrown into the creek, the water became
stained with blood. Grieving, he remained near the gully for two days.
According to Wangegamon, two days after the massacre two men named Anderson and
Watson visited the site and, seeing the bodies, felt remorse and asked Taylor
why he had killed so many women and children. Anderson, Charles Courtney, James
Ramslie, and James Hamilton subsequently made some fires and burned the bodies.
Two days after cremation, Taylor, Watson, and Anderson returned with a sack and
removed all the bones that had not been consumed by the fires.

It
is possible that the differences between these two accounts may only be
chronological; that is, that the cremation took place after removal of the
corpes from the Mount Emu Creek Waterhole, thus the accounts are complimentary.
The destruction of the corpses was a deliberate and commonly used attempt to
destroy hard evidence.

Many
of the survivors sought sanctuary at the Wesleyan mission, and it is largely
through the efforts of missionaries the Reverend Benjamin Hurst and Francis
Tuckfield, Assistant Protector Sievwright, and Chief Protector George Robinson,
that we know so much about this massacre.

In 1861, after the establishment of the Framingham
Aboriginal Station most of the surviving members of the Djargurd wurrung were
forcibly removed to the station with the exception of some of the elders who
stubbornly remained to eke out an existence on the edge of Camperdown.

Not all of the early settlers turned a blind eye to these
injustices and acts of genocide and those remaining were assisted by
people like H K James Dawson, a Scotsman who became a guardian for the
indigenous peoples from 1876 to 1882 and whose support came out of his own
pocket.

Returning home from
a trip home to Linlithgow in 1882 he found Fjargurd Wurrung Puyuun, the last survivor of the Djargurd Wurring people, had died and had been buried outside the Camperdown cemetery. After unsuccessfully appealing for
public money to support a memorial he had a granite
obelisk erected with a plaque at his own expense.

It was a sobering
reminder it took just 43 years of white settlement for the Djargurd wurrung to
be displaced from the Camperdown area.

A couple points: the run was Strathdownie not Glenormiston. Niel Black bought the rights to the run in December 1839, and occupied it in early 1840, and afterwards changed it to Glenormiston, named after the estate in Peebles, Scotland, of one of the partners in Niel Black and Co, William Steuart, who was also uncle of another partner, Thomas Steuart Gladstone. I am surprised Ian Clark, from whom most of your piece came, was so inaccurate as to repeatedly use Glenormiston as the name of the place when it clearly was not. It is simply not an oversight on his part.

Taylor's river was a local name for what was later called Mt Emu Creek. I have seen it on only one map, but I have also seen Black's river as the name. There was no official name changing as naming places had yet to go through a process of what one might call community ratification.

The second point is that today no one seems to know where the site of this massacre was. I have asked people and they generally say it is to the west of a point along the Camperdown- Darlington Road where a distinctive gully crosses the road. Yet one of the descriptions suggests it was in a gully somewhere opposite what you have called Merida, but which maybe Marida Yallock, or Maridayallock, the run then occupied by Mr Ewing, yallock being an Aboriginal word for creek. Marida yallock was opposite the Big Bend in Mt Emu Creek, at the southern end of Strathdownie/Glenormiston. The Camperdown-Darlington road is no where near that point. The only way to reconcile the various versions of the location of the massacre is to move to the other, northern, end of the run, which was about 5 miles or 8km, north of the bridge over Mt Emu Creek on Castle Carey rd, and about 5km south of where Murdering Gully joins Mt Emu Creek, and about 12 or 12 km from the nearest part of Marida yallock.

Thirdly, there are a couple problems with the stories, one being the considerable detail of the massacre but the lack of a clear description of the site that would enable anyone to find it. The substory about a woman swimming across Lake Bullenmerri to escape her pursuers is a common story in contact history, I have read them in South Australia too, but it is inexplicable because it would have been possible to ride around the lake faster than to swim across it. Swimming would have been no way to escape, regardless of the detail of when she jumped in and where she came out. I suspect in terms of these stories the swimming is a wish fulfillment, the desire for a happy ending to an appalling event, or it is about another event altogether.

There is no doubt the massacres took place, and that some effort was made to hide the bodies. Black said that when he and John Carre Riddell rode across the ford over Mt Emu Creek in December 1839, that Taylor, on hearing horses, scarpered because he believed it was the mounted police coming to arrest him. Black also saw the remains of the Aborigines when he had the waterhole cleared. He was deeply shocked by what he saw, and although he appears to be a hard man, he never raised a gun to anyone.

About Me

I have worked in the roles as Company Secretary or Divisional financial executive with larger Australian based multinational companies before changing careers in favour of sales and marketing for the latter 12 years of business life.
My particular interests include corporate social responsibility, ethics and research into more sustainable business practices.
I am a fellow of CPA Australia and an Associate member of the Governance Institute of Australia which was previously called the Chartered Secretaries Australia. I am chairman of the Malawi Support group who are a small group of catholic parishioners who raise funds to support a sister parish in Malawi.